The Science of God - how a lover of physics found the truth in Christianity

Chapter 7

Before I get into how I've started changing the way I speak to non-believers, let's back up again. I want to talk about time once more. Understand why this is important. Time is a subject that crosses both theological and scientific boundaries. It's a place of common ground, where the discussion can begin.

I love reading the different theories of time. Especially when it varies from the conventional linear aspect that we're all familiar with. From our perspective, time only moves forward, and there is only one path. Everyone follows it from the moment they're conceived until the day they die.

Let's illustrate it with a highway. A one-lane, one-way road with entrance and exit ramps for new arrivals and departures (births and deaths). That's time as we know it. You can't turn around. You can't pass anyone. If you exit...well, you get a nice funeral.

Now let's play "what if"?

What if time is like a two-way highway? Now you can go back the way you came. Even before your birth. And let's add a lane to both sides so we can pass other travelers. Now you can be crawling along in 2015 while I give it some gas and sprint ahead into 2020.

Now what if that highway weren't straight? What if it had a lot of curves? We can take exits that take shortcuts between those curves, skipping years, decades, or centuries altogether!

Crazy? Perhaps. As crazy as the idea of an all-powerful God, right? Well, if you go to the Physics section of your local Amazon store, you'll find many an intelligent man or woman of science speculation on such a possibility, or some variation thereof.

Remember, we are trapped in our own little bubble here on Earth. We're like the ants in an ant farm. The dirt between their walls of glass is all they know. If you were to reduce yourself to ant-size and go in and tell them all about this massive world outside their little farm...well, you'd be labeled a nutjob. A religious fanatic, no doubt.

So put yourself into the proper frame of mind. You are an ant in a very small ant farm. Outside your glass walls, time isn't just this single-directional unit of measurement. It bends. It takes detours. It has shortcuts. Or, perhaps, it doesn't have any boundaries at all.

In which case, anyone living outside these glass walls wouldn't be limited by time. Dare we say, this person would be able to set actions in motion anywhere along our timeline and know the outcome years, decades, centuries, before we do?

I'll let you chew on that one a while.